The ex-England scrum-half says she wants to ‘create something special’ on next year’s inaugural tour in New Zealand.

More movie chains? Shut UP. Here’s The Real Deal #30. 🎬

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Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton, who play Gen-Z strivers in Season 2 of Netflix’s limited series, open up about money, career ambition and their Midwestern roots.

A new permanent public art installation is in the works for LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. The large-scale video projection by Diana Thater was shot in Claude Monet’s gardens and will light the underside of the building where it bridges Wilshire Boulevard.

A documentary about ‘Wishbone’ tells the story of how the popular PBS children’s TV show was made with a group of artists, a cast of children and a Jack Russell terrier named Soccer.

The retailer once embodied a hope that clothes could be mass-manufactured and high-quality. Now it’s owned by the fast-fashion giant Shein.

<img src="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/5392×3592+0+0/resize/5392×3592!/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F32%2Fbf%2Fb59dbfc84f938cb6582410d33bf1%2Fp-23734-r.jpg" alt="Brendan Fraser plays Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Andrew Scott plays meteorologist James Stagg in the new film Pressure, about the tense lead-up to the D-Day invasion during World War II.”>

The new movie tells a story about how good meteorology can literally win wars. It also takes us back in time, to when the United States was at a disadvantage when it came to weather science.

(Image credit: Alex Bailey)

Some Senate Republican aides say there is growing support within the Senate GOP conference for ousting the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, after she ruled against a proposal to provide $1 billion for the White House ballroom, a move that would drastically change how the upper chamber operates. The ruling infuriated President Trump, who claimed last week…

QUEEN ELIZABETH NATIONAL PARK, Uganda — Located about 200 miles from the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the Congo, the fears of infection here are low.  Yet the anxiety over the consequences of the public health crisis is sky-high in places like Katunguru in western Uganda, where tourism is the lifeblood of the local…

Just as some Democrats around the country fervently hoped, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s GOP primary runoff. Had Cornyn prevailed, he likely would have easily won re-election against Democratic nominee James Talarico. But with Paxton on the ballot, Democrats have at least a chance at nabbing the seat. This election is about more than control of the Senate, as important as that is. It also spotlights the issue of corruption, which Democrats can run on not just in Texas, but across the country.

Though for years Democrats have hoped that the right combination of circumstances could turn Texas blue, the state remains consistently red. Democrats have not won any statewide race since 1994. Cornyn was re-elected to his seat by nearly 10% in 2020 and Donald Trump won the state by 14% in 2024.

Paxton’s record, however, gives Democrats new hope. Much like Trump, it’s hard to list the Texas attorney general’s scandals because there are so many of them. Some are relatively petty: In 2013, Paxton nabbed himself a $1,000 Montblanc pen someone had left in the basket at a courthouse metal detector, only returning it a year later after security footage revealed the pen pilferage (Paxton claimed he took the pen accidentally).

Others are far more sweeping: In 2015, Paxton was indicted for securities fraud; the case dragged on for nine years, and was finally resolved when he agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution and perform community service and “legal ethics education.” In 2020, attorneys who worked in Paxton’s office as attorney general reported him to the FBI, alleging that he had engaged in bribery and abuse of office. Among other things, it was alleged that Paxton encouraged a developer to hire a woman with whom the attorney general was having an extramarital affair. The Department of Justice eventually closed the investigation, but several of the whistleblowers successfully sued Paxton for $6.6 million — to be paid by Texas taxpayers. (Throughout these scandals, and even after those restitutions, Paxton insisted he’d committed no wrongdoing.)

Three years later, the Republican-dominated Texas House impeached Paxton on charges stemming from the whistleblowing and the affair. The Texas Senate acquitted Paxton, with his wife Angela, a state senator, recusing herself. In 2025, however, Angela announced that “after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds,” adding that “in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.”

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‘He’s just a crook’: Texas voters speak out about Senate GOP candidates ahead of runoff

May 25, 2026 / 02:09

So on one hand you have the state’s existing Republican tilt, and on the other you have the corruption issue. Talarico recognized the importance of this issue early in the campaign. He held a press conference in January outside Paxton’s office to tout his own anti-corruption agenda. And after media outlets called the race for Paxton on Tuesday night, Talarico put out a video calling his opponent “the most corrupt politician in America.”

There may never be a better time to run on questions of corruption. Trump’s actions in his second term are truly mind-boggling: from the gold-plated ballroom and the slush fund for insurrectionists to the way the administration is slashing regulation around crypto and prediction markets while the Trump family benefits from them, to the $400 million plane Qatar gifted Trump, to the government contracts given to companies with ties to Trump’s sons, to the Gulf emirates pouring money into Trump family firms. (The White House says there are no conflicts of interest when it comes to Trump or his family.)

Voters might be willing to ignore all this self-dealing if the economy were doing great, everyone had health insurance, housing was cheap and gas was $2 a gallon. But when people are struggling, corruption takes on a new urgency. That’s because it provides a way for voters to understand a deeper rot in the system that manifests in all kinds of ways. 

Look at Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, who was supposed to be the most vulnerable Democratic senator up for re-election this year. Ossoff has centered his campaign on corruption, a sweeping explanation for everything that is keeping people down and stressing them out. “You aren’t the problem. Neither are your fellow Americans,” he says. “Corruption is why things don’t work for ordinary people.” It’s a compelling message, and Republicans now fear they won’t be able to beat Ossoff. 

It’s also a message that is about Trump even when it doesn’t mention him, capitalizing on the discomfort even a portion of his supporters feel with his greed. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 20% of Republicans (and 40% of Republicans who don’t describe themselves as MAGA) oppose the construction of Trump’s ballroom. And the fact that usually pliant Senate Republicans have balked at funding the slush fund suggests they know the public reaction will not be positive. Unlike issues with a clearer ideological valence, corruption makes both liberal and conservative voters angry. That means candidates running everywhere — blue, red or purple, urban or rural — can talk to voters about it. 

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Trump’s ballroom has ‘become a personal obsession’: Leibovich

May 26, 2026 / 07:43

As the party that believes in government, Democrats tend to care more about policy, the nuts and bolts of governing. They often believe policy is the key to voters’ hearts. They tell themselves that if they can come up with the right framing for a healthcare plan or climate proposal, that will lead to victory. Republicans, on the other hand, often have a better understanding of the deep emotional undercurrents of politics, which helps them sidestep the fact that their top policy priorities — like tax cuts for the rich — are unpopular. 

Corruption can help Democrats bridge the gap between policy and persuasion because while it absolutely implicates policy choices, it also transcends individual issues. It speaks to the profound dissatisfaction Americans are feeling about a system in which the rich keep getting richer and democracy keeps eroding further. Thanks to Trump, political corruption is already more visible than ever. Paxton’s nomination could make it the issue of the midterms.

The post Ken Paxton’s win gifts Democrats their 2026 midterms strategy appeared first on MS NOW.

The Justice Department’s lawyers were once considered the gold standard for prosecutors, with an appointment as U.S. attorney considered a pinnacle of many careers. But over the past year and a half, the bar has been dropping considerably. With an unprecedented spate of grand jury rejections and judicial admonishments, the DOJ’s credibility has eroded to the point that courts should no longer trust the men and women who are meant to speak on behalf of the United States at trials.

We’re witnessing a downward spiral precipitated by the Trump administration prioritizing loyalty to the MAGA agenda over hiring and retaining qualified legal candidates. Many of the lawyers who are now serving under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche have little to no courtroom experience under their belts. As a result, even what is normally considered the easiest part of a criminal case has become a minefield of uncertainty and hotbed of misconduct.

Federal prosecutors hoping to convince a jury to convict must provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. Obtaining an indictment from a grand jury, on the other hand, merely requires convincing a panel of citizens that there’s enough evidence for a prosecution to proceed to trial. While President Donald Trump has pushed for more politicized prosecutions from the DOJ, a growing number of grand juries have refused to accept the charges presented to them — and some federal lawyers are now willing to do whatever it takes to move their prosecutions forward.

Last week, a federal judge in Chicago threw out charges against four Democratic activists, the last remaining members of the so-called Broadview Six arrested last year during a protest outside an immigration detention center. The feds had already dropped a felony charge of conspiracy to impede a federal agent, leaving only a misdemeanor charge of simple assault of a federal officer.

Days before the trial was to begin, as The New York Times reported, the judge called in the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, to call him to task:

The blunders shocked the judge, April M. Perry, who recounted from the bench on Thursday how prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room — a major breach of protocol — and had improperly coached them that the evidence they had presented was particularly strong.

The prosecutors also stacked the deck in their own favor by removing from the panel some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Making matters even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts — that is, until Judge Perry ordered them to give her the full copies.

The situation was even worse in Wyoming, where a panel of three federal judges tossed nine indictments from U.S. Attorney Darin Smith, who had never held a prosecutorial role before his appointment last August. As their ruling noted, Smith told grand jurors before presenting any evidence that the people he was charging were all “‘bad guys,’ ‘murderers,’ ‘bad people’ and ‘not run of the mill criminals seen in state court” — but only one of the defendants was indicted for murder. During a break, Smith then handed out his business card and, according to his own court filing, “invited the grand jury panel members to reach out to him.”

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Watch: Psaki reviews shocking litany of political targeting by Trump’s DOJ

May 7, 2026 / 12:06

It’s the kind of basic foolishness that even an attorney in their first year out of law school should know to avoid. But then again, the Justice Department did recently open the door to hiring freshly minted lawyers in response to the dwindling pool of more qualified candidates. According to Bloomberg Law, the department’s Civil Division has even resorted to offering $25,000 signing bonuses for lawyers “investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.” The division, which is responsible for defending the government in court against lawsuits, is also reportedly handing out a “retention incentive allowance” to keep what staffers it still has from jumping ship.

In some ways, the struggle the DOJ is facing is unsurprising — and can still be plenty harmful. When autocracies purge experienced leaders and experts, the vacuum is mostly likely to be filled with mediocrity. New research from German political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel examined the motivations for government officials during Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s and ’80s. Their work illustrates how many of the midlevel figures carrying out the regime’s orders weren’t extremists or victims but instead, as The New York Times’ Amanda Taub framed it, “middling workers trying to get ahead.”

The embarrassing level of mediocracy on display at the Justice Department feels apt in that context. Few of the lawyers still defending the government’s mass detention program are likely to be as zealous as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Instead, more are most likely akin to Robert Keenan, who is currently acting deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, one of the top roles in a storied office. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Keenan, describing him as someone “passed over for promotions repeatedly in his 24-year career” and “still handling low-level cases typically reserved for first-year federal prosecutors” before his meteoric rise under Trump. He’s presented as typical of a group that has “been rewarded with more power and responsibility by an administration that increasingly prizes loyalty above legal pedigree.”

It’s troubling that several judges have already told federal lawyers that they have lost the “presumption of regularity,” the assumption that the government is telling the truth in court. It is likewise concerning that grand juries can no longer accept that they are being told the truth when presented with evidence of a crime. While there’s some bit of hope — not to mention schadenfreude — that comes from seeing this Justice Department fall on its face, each failure on its part helps erode faith in the legal system. It will be a long, hard road to rebuilding the trust that the Trump administration has squandered with its reckless, baseless persecutions.

The post The DOJ’s deeply unimpressive bench of MAGA lawyers is failing the easy part appeared first on MS NOW.

There has been a lot of buzz about A24’s latest entry into the cinematic horror sweepstakes where it seems every weekend a new You Tuber or previously unknown young filmmaker becomes the next big thing. Coming off self-financed You Tuber Mark Fischbach’s $50 million grossing early 2026 success, Iron Lung, and in the last couple […]